1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to combinatorial exchanges, and more specifically, to associating one or more processing features with one or more bids or one or more bid groups, wherein each processing feature modifies the processing of the one or more bids or the one or more bid groups.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Various systems have been proposed and constructed to support online exchanges, forward auctions and reverse auctions. The most general of these market types is an exchange, which permits one or more bidders to offer to sell and/or purchase one or more items. An item may be any entity of value, such as a good or service. A forward auction is a special case of an exchange with a single seller. A reverse auction is a special case of an exchange with single buyer.
Combinatorial exchanges support advanced exchange designs and expressive bidding. These features permit an exchange to be designed to achieve best economic efficiency.
One example of expressive bidding is combinatorial bids. Combinatorial bids allow bidders to bid on multiple items with a single bid. The combination, or bundle of items, is determined by the bidder. This is advantageous when the items exhibit complementarity, i.e., when the value of the bundle of items is worth more to the bidder than the sum of the separate item values, or substitutability, i.e., where different items are interchangeable to the bidder. Combinatorial bids allow bidders to express their true preference, resulting in the best economic allocation.
A drawback of combinatorial exchanges is that determination of winning bids that optimizes the objective is computationally intractable (NP complete). For example, the exchange objective could be to maximize the number of items traded, or to maximize surplus, that is, the difference between ask bid revenue and pay bid cost
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide an input specification mechanism that supports efficient processing in a way to maximize seller revenue while minimizing buyer cost. Still other objects of the invention will become apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art upon reading and understanding the following detailed description.